It's Back To Voting For The Debian Init System

[tga.d]

How come everyone aren't voting at the same time? It leaves plenty of room for "tactical" voting when one party are able to see another party's votes ahead of their own votes.

Voting is done by email, and

with a voting period of one week or until the outcome is no longer in doubt

[Marc Driftmeyer]

The CTTE consists of 8 members.

https://www.debian.org/intro/organization

[Delgarde]

The L option makes a lot of sense if you accept the premise that the current and former Canonical employees on the CTTE are actually fighting on behalf of Canonical.

It doesn't actually, because at least one of the Upstart partisans is against the L option - Steve Langasek has spoken out several times in the past week objecting to the idea. He might be strongly in favour of Upstart (unsurprising, given he's one of the biggest developers), but his attitude towards the coupling question is closer to that of the Systemd supporters - he's smart enough to recognise that the L option is a bad idea, and honest enough to say so. As far as I can tell, it's only Ian Jackson who's utterly uncompromising on this issue.

[Delgarde]

also, i might be wrong here but i think i remember kde spin of fedora is using systemd like that. don't take me on my word here, i seem to remember reading that, but i'm no kde user

To my knowledge, all Fedora spins use systemd as the system init.

But that's unrelated to the use of systemd as a user session manager, i.e a systemd instance running as the user, starting up various desktop services. Nobody is doing that yet, but Gnome has been looking closely at it over the past year, and the subject has been raised several times by KDE developers.

[Delgarde]

How come everyone aren't voting at the same time? It leaves plenty of room for "tactical" voting when one party are able to see another party's votes ahead of their own votes.

Trust me... you're not the first to point that out. It's been discussed at length by the committee themselves, along with pretty much anything you could possibly think might be relevant.

If they make a decision before they all die of old age, it'll be because enough of them get weary enough of endless talk that they team up to bulldoze *something* past the argumentative remainder... it's like those jury trials that last months, ending only everyone wants it to be over more than they care about the result.

[GreatEmerald]

Also, I read "Bdale" as "B Dale", which pretty much sounds like an action video game protagonist.

You read it correctly. Though it's a contraction of Barksdale.

It doesn't actually, because at least one of the Upstart partisans is against the L option - Steve Langasek has spoken out several times in the past week objecting to the idea. He might be strongly in favour of Upstart (unsurprising, given he's one of the biggest developers), but his attitude towards the coupling question is closer to that of the Systemd supporters - he's smart enough to recognise that the L option is a bad idea, and honest enough to say so. As far as I can tell, it's only Ian Jackson who's utterly uncompromising on this issue.

I'm pleasantly surprised about it. His points are actually quite sensible on this and he explicitly doesn't want to hold Debian back with requirements to not use init functionality, like Jackson does. At this point I don't expect many issues on the second voting, once the language is agreed upon.

[Pesho]

Colin Watson just voted other options before F, which means that D (systemd) is the winner:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte/2014/02/msg00332.html

[stikonas]

It seems systemd is winning this time.

[interested]

It doesn't actually, because at least one of the Upstart partisans is against the L option - Steve Langasek has spoken out several times in the past week objecting to the idea. He might be strongly in favour of Upstart (unsurprising, given he's one of the biggest developers), but his attitude towards the coupling question is closer to that of the Systemd supporters - he's smart enough to recognise that the L option is a bad idea, and honest enough to say so. As far as I can tell, it's only Ian Jackson who's utterly uncompromising on this issue.

As I said, it hasn't been about Upstart vs systemd for a while; systemd would win in the CTTE, and Upstart are very unlikely to win a GR either, since it has limited popular support among DD's.

All the losing Upstart side can do now, is to salvage as many advantages they can. Ian's L coupling was a clever idea, but every member on the CTTE seems to be very smart people (my respect for Debian has grown much by following this process), so it failed.

Since the writing was on the wall, it is hardly surprising that Steve have been back-pedalling on the issue in order to gain maximum influence. His goal is the same; to maximize the Debian support for packages to work without using systemd. That may be because of his genuine belief that this is good for Debian, but it sure is also something that benefit Canonical.

[justmy2cents]

Colin Watson just voted other options before F, which means that D (systemd) is the winner:

https://lists.debian.org/debian-ctte.../msg00332.html

it was always like this. problem were people changing votes to fd after voting.